Ancient Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times. This web site is my attempt to document, from my perspective, these "interesting times".

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Peak Wingnut

John Cole proposes and then quickly withdraws the theory that we have achieved Peak Wingnut, which I take to mean that point in which wingnut bloviation about Democrats is no longer taken seriously by virtue of the fact that it is wingnuttery. He proposed it first because he saw, via memeorandum, the spread through the wingnuttosphere of new attempts to smear Obama that came and went with the rapidity of a humingbirds wingbeat. He withdrew it when he saw some new story about Obama being involved in gay pedophilia rearing its ugly head.

I think he was to quick to withdraw it. For, as I said, I take Peak Winguttery to be that point in which wingnuttery just doesn't have the ability to automatically leak into the mainstream media like it used to. Time was all you had to do was get an Instapundit to link to a smear and it was almost certain it would spread like gangrene into the mainstream bloodstream within a matter of days.

But we've built up a good regime of immunities to that kind of crap. So the ability for this stuff to spread has been seriously hampered. And the harder it is to spread the harder the wingnuts try to spread even more outrageous crap. Which just builds up even more immunities.

So the failure of wingnuttery is not a factor of whether they will find new crap to spew. It is whether that crap spreads beyond its (rapidly shrinking) sphere of influence.